AGORA VARIATIONS

AGORA VARIATIONS is my response to the redevelopment of the municipal market, the Agora, in Chania, Crete.

Between 2022 and 2025 I recorded different phases of the deconstruction and reconstruction of this architecturally and culturally significant building. Paintings and drawings made over time hover in the space between figuration and abstraction.They reveal many different faces of the Agora.

More widely they celebrate the allure of empty, abandoned, derelict spaces, the qualities of demolition sites and ruins: reminders of the transience of life. They also acknowledge the process of ageing, traces of the passage of time, how things change yet remain the same. Rather like the capacity of Crete to retain an individual identity having absorbed successive foreign influences throughout a turbulent history.

For me, the images that constitute AGORA VARIATIONS are like musical variations, which sound different from, but are recognisably based upon, an original theme.

THE AGORA in Chania, modelled on the cruciform design of the market in Marseille opened in 1913, the year Crete was unified with Greece. It functioned as a “junction box”, a meeting and mingling place for citizens and visitors, a site where rural traditions and the commercial interests of a modern city overlapped.

After decades of neglect and decline the building became structurally unsafe. The Agora closed in 2021. Traders were displaced, stalls and shops were demolished and the vast market hall was gutted. A once vibrant site was transformed into a still and silent, mysterious and melancholic space: the prelude to a protracted, disrupted and controversial “renovation” project.

THE AGORA in city-states throughout Ancient Greece was an important public space where citizens assembled for a variety of purposes: social, civic, religious, commercial.